Aster Capital leads financing round for SolarFuel

Venture capital firm Aster Capital, sponsored by Alstom, Solvay Rhodia and Schneider Electric, has announced a 4 million investment in SolarFuel GmbH. This is part of a 7.5 million financing round that Aster Capital is leading. The investment round includes Ventrex Automotive GmbH from Austria.

SolarFuel will use the funds to accelerate development of its proprietary electrolysis and gasification technologies, and step up market development in Germany and elsewhere.

SolarFuel GmbH has collaborated with German research institutes to successfully develop the SolarFuel technology that enables the conversion of renewable electricity into synthetic natural gas, thereby allowing storage. The existing natural gas network becomes the cornerstone for renewable energy systems, and provides the storage and transport capacities which are unavailable in the power grid, as the company states.

Alexander Schlaepfer, Partner at Aster Capital says, "We have been looking for some time at what technologies are required to optimize large amounts of electricity generated by renewables and we recognized that SolarFuel not only presents a very viable solution to store energy but actually to arbitrage renewable energy between different uses."

SolarFuel already has an alpha plant successfully in operation connected to an electric load of 25kW with an overall power-to-gas efficiency of 40% (without optimization measures). A 6 MW demonstration plant is being planned with the goal being set to test the SolarFuel technology on a scale that is practical for the energy sector under real-life economic conditions.

Ventrex Automotive’s CEO Christian Planegger sees the opportunity to take SolarFuel to the "next level" and "capitalize on the already noticeably growing use of clean natural gas for mobility".

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